Years ago, I had a stack of archaic 5 1/4" floppy disks (still have some for some old Apple II computers). Then, the slightly small, added capacity of 3 1/2" disks (there's dozens kicking around my desk at home). CD's and DVD's consume two boxes (I should sort them). And now I'm collecting thumb drives (four with 7 GB of storage in total).

But there may come one storage technology to defeat them all; Phase Change memory. Developed by the Lithuanian-American scientist Stanford R. Ovshinsky back in the 1960's, PRAM (a.k.a. PCM, PRAM, PCRAM, Ovonic Unified Memory and Chalcogenide RAM C-RAM) relies on the physical change of a material to hold data, rather than the conventional storage of electrons, switching of transistor like gates, or the magnetic mediums we are familiar with today.

Using Chalcogenide glass (a type of glass containing either sulfur, selenium or tellurium), it becomes possible with electrical currents to change the physical structure of the glass from crystalline (structured) to amorphous (non-structured), and back again.

Both Intel and STMicroelectronics have been working towards PRAM memory in the hopes of unlocking its distinctive advantages over that of conventional memory. Phase change memory has been clocked in laboratory settings at nearly 100,000 times faster than conventional memory specs. It also claims faster write speeds at 1ms to 10ns per byte of data. Furthermore, the MTBF (MeanTimeBetweenFailure) is on the order of 100,000,000 writes per sector, where as regular flash memory can only withstand 10,000 to 100,000 writes per sector before signs of failure.

There are a couple of short comings to Phase Change memory though. First, since it is made out of the same materials that comprise the recordable medium upon CD's and DVD's, the compounds used must be heated to 600 Celsius and above to create enough convection turbulence within the material to have it become amorphous. Furthermore, higher than normal voltages are required for both the read and write phase of the memory. Significant obstacles to overcome, but ones that can be greatly reduced with further refinement and research.

Perhaps Phase Change memory will never make it to portable devices such as digital cameras, thumb drives and media player. But there of course will be a home for it in PC's and Servers that demand faster memory performance. Now all that remains is for the chipset designers to increase FSB speeds to stay on par with future memory speeds. 

Sorry, the first Phase Change memory launch is still a few years away.